How Structured Data Can Help Your Click Trough Rate

Structured data helps search engines understand the information on webpages and provide richer results. When implemented, these markups parse your data into different type of search results or also known as “rich snippets”, which has seen to have increased click-through-rates of some websites of up to 30%! Don’t get a bit too excited though because not all markups are showing such beautiful rich snippets on serps. But who knows what will happen in the future?

What is Structured Data

Structured Data is what you call the markups that abide a predetermined set of rules. Structured data defines the type of data of your markup and also the relationship between each of them. These can be later read by various browsers and search engine bots. At the moment there are different structured data markup a website can use.

What is Schema.org

It has been more than 2 years since Schema.org was released in collaboration of the major search engines Google, Yahoo, andd Bing. This aims to provide a shared structured data markup volabulary scheme supported by major search engines to make it easier for webmasters to avoid trade offs based on which markup type is supported by search engines.

Let’s say you’re looking to watch Insidious 2 with your family this coming Halloween and therefore would like to see if this movie is any good.

search engine results page

With the above search result, you are more likely to click on the first link on the page that has better looking search results than the other one or even the rest of the page.

Getting Started with Schema.org

I can honestly say that Schema.org can be a bit overwhelming and tedious at some point, but it is actually pretty straightforward and easy to follow even if you just have very basic html knowledge. To get started, you’ll have to check this pages and tools to familiarize yourself with what you’re going to do.

Before proceeding with creating markup for your content, we recommend checking out the websites mentioned above, specially Schema.org for you to be able to understand the process more.

How to Markup Your Content?

Let’s say we have the below piece of of information on a website and its corresponding html code.

iformat pty ltd

The first step is to actually head to Schema.org and then choose a schema itemtype from Schema.org’s full list of schemas (link to http://schema.org/docs/full.html). In this example, we choose Local Business schema. We will then have to declare this to the section of the code that talks about the business information. The below markup will notify the search engines that this section is about a particular item and it’s about a Local Business.

We will then give additional information to the search engines by labeling properties of an item, by using the itemprop attribute. With our example, our business have telephone numbers, fax, email and address location. You may see the complete properties associed with Local Business by going here http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

schema markup

There’s a lot more interesting properties you can find on Schema.org’s list of properties like services your offer, business office hours, employee and a lot more. You can even embed another itemtype within itemtype. Everything to know can be found on Schema.org’s website. Finally, we can check how search engine will see our markup by going to Google’s Rich Snippet Tool.

Google's Rich Snippet Tool

Type in the URL of the webpage with the markup and it’ll show you the extracted structured data.